Ha! that place used to be called "Rainbows" & was a big teen club in the 80's…then it was called "Coconut Beach Club" in the late 80's-early 90's. I got kicked out of there for fighting, which is pretty freaking ridiculous if you know me.
Of course, the Coconut Beach Club was backed by silent partner (and Ohioan) Roger Troutman, best known as a hip-hop pioneer from his work in Zapp, including his revolutionary work with the talkbox, a sound now popularized as similar to "auto-tune". Well, that fateful night in '89, I rolled into the Coconut Beach Club, hot on the trail of my sort-of girlfriend who seemed to be playing hard to get by getting into a car with some other guy and going out with him. (I was later to find out that this in fact was her boyfriend, and I was "the other guy" but you gotta think about how it seemed to me, especially being 19 and drunk).
I screeched into the parking lot, and ran into the club. Now, I happened to be wearing a purple tank-top (otherwise known as the "wife beater") because this girl A: told me her favorite color was purple and B: said she thought tank tops were hot. I was also sporting a wicked mullet, just to complete the picture. I guess it really completes the picture to just go ahead and say that at this point in my life, I would do absolutely anything if a girl I liked suggested it.
Anyway, I blasted into the club and immediately got in the face of this strange "dude" that was all over my girl. What bullshit! She seemed oddly mortified as if she'd been "caught" doing something wrong, which actually took me a couple years to piece together. Yes, at that time, my brain activity was centered about 2.5 feet lower than it is now, and I was incapable of rational thought. All I could see was this strange guy interfering with me & the love of my life & I pushed him to the floor as hard as I could. The bouncers circled in, and grabbed me, while the guy got up & got a quick punch to my gut before they could stop him…or maybe they just thought I deserved it, I don't know.
So I'm resisting and pushing as much as a 19 year-old 140 pound guy can do, when out from the back room comes none other than Roger fucking Troutman! He saunters up to me, looks me over and cooly says "Boy, I'm not gonna kick you out of here for fighting…I'm kicking you out for making my club look so damn bad with that white trash getup! You supposed to be Prince's mechanic or something?" He turned around and started to walk away…then spun around and kicked me HARD in the nuts! I doubled over and almost puked. Of course, the downside of thinking with your dick, is when you get kicked there, all brain waves cease.
They dragged me out & threw me into the parking lot. I puked next to my car & laid there in a pool of my own vomit for 20 minutes. The only thing I remember of the rest of the evening was my girl coming outside and mouthing "call me"…and me dragging myself into the car & limping home. The evening was a disaster…kicked in the nuts, punched in the gut…but most importantly, my girlfriends choice of clothing (meaning mine, of course) was insulted. This was unacceptable…Roger Troutman would pay!
I've never been a man of many skills, but I have to say that if I were to develop a present ability of mine into a superpower, it would be my ability to hold a grudge. If I am wronged, I may forgive…but trust me, I will never forget an insult, no matter how slight. Skip ahead to the early 90's. Roger Troutman, now retired from music (and club ownership) is residing in Dayton Ohio, and running for City Councilman. The idea that the man who so insulted me in front of my girlfriend (and her uh…boyfriend) is running for public office re-ignites my fires of irrational rage and vengeance. I have no political clout & no advertising budget. But I am in college & working part-time as a painter. And what I DO have is access to a large quantity of paint, ladders, and a crew that will do virtually anything for a few lines of coke. We decide (in a haze of the aforementioned coke, dampened with a sizeable quantity of tequila) that the best way to defeat him is with an aerial assault combined with my graphic art skills.
Late one Monday night, we descended on the Sullivant Avenue address, all of us coked, stoned, drunk and any other "ed" we could get our hands on, ready to unleash "The Plan". We scaled the walls, climbed up to the roof, and amazingly, pulled off exactly what we intended to do…and I believe we only lost one man in the process. "Delbert" (and that's his real name, I couldn't make that up) stepped off the roof thinking he was stepping into a swimming pool. Let me just say that Roger Troutman was no Rick James, and in fact I can affirm that his statement that "Cocaine is one hell of a drug". We pulled it off though, and by the time the sun rose, the roof now looked like this:

Of course, Roger was no longer associated with this nightclub…and with Columbus for that matter! This was irrelevant to me, as my thirst for revenge was anything but rational. At this point, very few of my thoughts were rational, but I didn't care, I finally stuck it to the guy who humiliated me in front of the mother of what was now someone else's children.
The election came & went, and I felt a smug sense of accomplishment when Roger was thoroughly trounced in the election. I was certain that I had swayed the all-important "out of town private aircraft owners easily susceptible to typographical suggestion" vote, which no doubt tipped the election against Mr. Troutman.
My glee faded over the years and extinguished altogether with a tragic convergence of events in 1999. Roger was found gunned down by his own brother in a Dayton recording studio. This horrific event not only ended the career of one of the pioneers of funk, but also sparked a personal revelation that not only was the girl I thought was my girlfriend in fact now married and had children with someone else and that I was never really a part of that relationship but merely a creepy classmate who she was once nice too & I couldn't let it go, but also that purple tank-tops were a horrible convergence of stylistic choices, even for the time! And did I mention that I was also wearing turquoise jams???? I should have kicked MYSELF in the nuts! I did Roger Troutman a huge disservice and I had to undo it. I set out to correct my wrongs. Well, at least the whole "painting his roof" part; there was nothing I could do about my years of apparent stalking, assault, and that god-awful tank top/shorts combo.
I grabbed a gallon of paint, a ladder, and a roller, and set out to re-paint the roof. Well once I got up there, it turned out the roof was in pretty bad shape, and the paint didn't cover as well as I thought it would. So I could only partially cover my graffiti. At that moment, I had a brainstorm. (and given that I had long given up using cocaine, this one actually made sense). Could I possibly transform such a negative message into something positive? Instead of imploring people to vanquish a person's aspirations…could I instead convince them to take a positive stance on something? In retrospect, I could have come up with something much better, but hell, it was 2 am, I was half drunk, and I only had 1 fucking gallon of paint. So the best I could come up with was "EAT TROUT". The trout of the world may not be too thrilled with the result, but at least my aerial campaign to tarnish the legacy of funkmaster Roger Troutman had finally come to an end.
So yeah, that's the story! Kind of a weird coincidence that would come up on this board after all these years.